| Saddam's
execution may widen Christian-Muslim divide
By Leon D'Souza
January 23, 2007 | MUMBAI, India
-- It would have been yet another dour morning at London's
Heathrow Airport.
The sun flickered timidly through
brooding clouds, casting ominous shadows over the rain-soaked
tarmac. Inside the terminal, disoriented travelers tossed
and turned on uncomfortable chairs, in no mood to greet
the dawn; others moseyed about the concourse, wrestling
with the discombobulating effects of cheating time.
I turned away from the throng to
face a television set, my eyes open just a chink, my
ears unable to pick up on the commentary through the
rumbling din of the transit crowds. I tried to coax
myself back to sleep, but the words roused me out of
my quiescent slumber.
"Hussein ... executed ..."
I stirred.
"Saddam Hussein ... former
leader ..."
What was that?
I was now sitting up straight. The
headline stared me in the face: "Saddam Hussein executed
in Iraq."
This couldn't be true, I thought,
nearly leaping out of my seat. They finished him off
so quickly?
I searched other faces in the waiting
area, many also glued to TV sets, all ostensibly asking
the same question: what prompted such swift and severe
legal action?
To be sure, the former Iraqi dictator's
execution was something of an anomaly in international
justice, accustomed to lumbering along at a tedious
pace.
Former Yugoslav president Slobodan
Milosevic, for example, dodged the hangman's noose for
five agonizing years before succumbing to a weak heart
in his prison cell. Even the monstrous Adolf Eichmann,
who supervised the transfer of Jews to extermination
camps during World War II, successfully evaded the death
sentence for more than a decade before his hanging in
1962.
Yet, in two short years, Saddam Hussein
was a closed chapter.
Surely, this was a positive development,
I reasoned. The man was, after all, an oppressive ruler,
a tyrant who ran roughshod over his own people. Death
is clearly what someone with such bloodlust deserves.
But then, Saddam had been sentenced
for the killing of 148 Shiites in the northern town
of Dujail, the Iraqis suspected of involvement in a
botched assassination attempt on his life in 1982. He
had yet to face trial for the gassing of thousands of
Kurds in the border town of Halabja in 1988, during
the waning days of the Iran-Iraq war.
For the Kurds, I imagined, this couldn't
quite be perfect justice. Might the Iraqi government
not have waited until after that trial to execute the
man? Would not such patience have brought lasting closure?
The timing, I began to think, seemed
too quick -- too rushed to feel right. And something
about it all left me more than a little uneasy.
It seemed too much like retributive
justice. An eye for an eye, the stuff Gandhi said would
make the whole world blind.
How blind -- and to what exactly
-- I wouldn't realize until several days later, when
The Times of India carried an article about pro-Saddam
protesters injured in two north Indian states. The grim
photograph accompanying the story showed two women,
seen through a shattered window, their faces covered
in blood.
The newspaper reported instances
of "massive brickbat-throwing between members of two
communities" resulting in police firing "rubber bullets
to disperse violent mobs which took to the streets ...
shouting anti-U.S. and anti-Bush slogans."
The clashes appeared to result out
of a show of solidarity with the Iraqi people, although
I couldn't quite comprehend why the passions ran so
deep among India's Muslims, traditionally an insular
lot whose expressions of Islamic nationalism were mostly
confined to the Indian subcontinent.
Could their agitation be evidence
of a new and energetic pan-Islamic unity that transcends
geography and historical precedent? That is to say,
could Saddam's capture and execution have exacerbated
the divisions between the Islamic East and the broadly
Christian West? And could it also have deepened the
chasm within Islam, between majority Sunnis and minority
Shiites?
We may find answers to these questions
in recent news reports from India and other countries
in the Asian region.
In the Indian state of Kashmir, for
example, the Christian Web site AsiaNews reported in
November that Christian converts were fast becoming
targets of Islamic militancy. Reporter Nirmala Carvalho
covered the killing of one Bashir Tantray, a convert
from Islam, who was active in evangelization programs
in the troubled state.
In Indonesia, Muslim-Christian violence
has continued unabated since the late 1990s, especially
in parts of Sulawesi, where riots erupted again last
year.
Iraq, of course, is a smoldering
inferno of communal strife, with reports surfacing of
terrible atrocities in Baghdad and the surrounding region.
Mardon Matrood, an Assyrian shopkeeper in the capital,
told a United Nations news service that minorities in
Iraq were being targeted by insurgents and militias
"as they promote what they call the 'cleansing of Iraq,
of non-Muslim communities.'"
While Iraq's sectarian woes remain
the focus of media attention in the West, the Indian
and Indonesian experiences may be more revealing.
Indonesia is the world's most populous
Muslim-majority nation, and India comes in second, with
more than 170 million Muslim faithful. India also is
home to the world's third largest Shiite population.
What these statistics suggest is
that tensions sweeping India and Indonesia may be more
indicative of a trend emerging across the Muslim world:
an unsettling narrative of Christian-Muslim discord,
fuelled in large measure by the unfolding drama in Iraq.
This has consequences for the stability
of the modern world.
If Western powers, led by the United
States, do not aggressively seek an end to the current
military entanglement, while working unreservedly to
further a social and religious dialogue, we may well
be facing the most violent threat to the modern system
of sovereign states since the Peace of Westphalia was
signed in 1648.
It's a dire prognosis with no easy
treatment.
My prescription is simply this: let's
put aside the guns and talk.
PB
PB
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